So yesterday I go out to the shed and there is an alarm going off. It was the inverter alarm saying battery voltage was low. I shut off the alarm and started looking over the system. Seems it had done a power shut down. Which is what my fail safe was designed to do.
I pulled the plug on the inverter and checked the voltage coming in from the panels. Zero volts, the whole system had no voltage what so ever.
I finally found the main charge controller circuit was down because of 50 amp circuit breaker had tripped. Man over 50 amps is a lot for this system to be pushing, no wonder the batteries were way down.
So I reset the breaker and restarted the system but it still it was not running right. Low voltage and slow charging after many hours told me we needed to get further.
I swapped out the charge controller and if anything that made it worse. So ether I have two bad controllers or something else is wrong. I get to playing with my temp gun, which is also giving me grief because of the heat in the shed and test and tighten all connections.
This reveals one power connection from the main line coming in from the panels had a much higher temp (160 deg.) than the rest of the connections. So I again shut down the solar system again and pull the connection apart.
Now the circuit I am working on is an enclosed circuit but I striped it down and found the problem. The connections were loose and had disintegrated most of the wire leading to the charge controller which is why it was giving me so many weird voltage reading. Pulled the wire completely out and replaced it with a new 8 gauge wire (The original was 10 gauge) and replace the end caps on the 50 amp circuit breaker.
Bam we are back up and running hard. Panels voltage went up to 19 volts and amp output pegged in at 21 amps. Now we are really cooking considering it is an almost complete overcast day.
I am leaving the system to charge itself back up so I have the shed running on isolated power I put in from the stand up park power post till the batteries are back up to full charge. They got really drained down and hopefully nothing happened to them and they make another comeback……….. As it is not good to let them get that run down on charge.
It’s Always an Adventure! Although a little less adventurous at 118º……… LOL
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